Monday, October 12, 2009

Myself As An Example Of What Not To Be

I've used browsing the news sites on the internet as an excuse to get outta writing something this morning as long as I could stand it. I don't have "writer's block". I never have. That's probably because I don't try to tell the truth or deliberately lie. I ought to. It's the thing to do I suppose, but since I project my idea of what the world is like upon other people, as long as there are people, then I've got something to write about.

My youngest brother, who is also my next door neighbor who lives even further back in the woods than me, came over to see what the hell I was doing over here banging around with a hammer. It's hardly unusual for either of us to be curious about the other's projects. Sometime we can be useful as an extra pair of hands.

I explained how I was erecting the two double-paned sliding doors to see if they would shield me from all the noise I get from the shopping center a couple of miles away as the crow flies. Like me he seemed a little nebulous, but agreed that if something could be done, then it should be done. Nobody is making any noise just to piss me off, it's a serious matter of where I located my house.

When I first started my house the airport was just starting to grow and expand. They got money from the FAA, they had to spend it or lose it. My family's farm just got in the way. There was no shopping center to draw traffic and make the noise that's completely unreasonable. Since I don't rule the world (Dammit!!), it's me that's gotta make the adjustments.

He acted like the reason he came over here was to find out what I was doing, but I suspect the real reason was to tell me that he had talked it over with his wife, and they had decided to go on a two-week trip to India under the auspices of the international branch of the Rotary Club.

Both of my younger brothers belong to the Rotary Club. They're both businessmen. Businessmen find it useful to network. Rotary, I suppose, is a good enough way to do it. Particularly if it provides an opportunity to traipse around India under favorable conditions for a while. My ex-wife should have married one of them, and probably would have if it hadn't been for me. Life is complicated.

The strange thing is (or at least to me it is strange) that as we get some age on us, the more they remind me of my father. They didn't rebel against our parents the way I did. They swear they learned better than to do that from witnessing the murderous relationship my father and I had as I became a teenager and attempted mightily to discover my true identity apart from the authority of our parents. They might also swear that the only real thing they learned from their oldest brother was what not to do. No blame.

As I sat and listened to my brother enthuse over him and his wife's upcoming trip to India I saw him as my father saying the same thing he said just before he and my mother made a belated "grand tour" of Europe, Russia before it's fall, and Australia and New Zealand. The only grand tours I made was in the Navy, paid for by the government, and as a penniless bum.

All my siblings might be considered well-to-do except me. My children hate me for it. Sometime I hate me for it too, and then hate myself FOR them in addition to my self-hatred, and my ex-wive's hatred for me too. Well, they would hate me for being what it is that I am and am not if they knew me well enough to aim their dislike of me. I guess I'm lucky they don't know me that well. They left me, not the other way around.

Sometime I think I must represent what every member of my various families hate about themselves. It's like I am is the scapegoat for all the ills of their subjective worlds. My ex-wife's mother was said to have told my children at every opportunity how much she hated me, and that she hated me even before we ever met.

I've wondered about this situation a lot. Maybe people love to hate me because I'm so talented for carrying the weight of their dislike of themselves. I should deny it and let them find another home for it, but I'm pretty strong, and somebody gotta do it, and I've dumped enough of my own self-hatred to understand what it's like to be free of hatred, so why would I not be there for them in their hour of need?

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Time's A'wasting!


Thank God it's Sunday. Last night was another noisy night. With the Moose hall a quarter mile down the road Saturday nights are never quiet. Besides that, the next door neighbor (around 500 meters away) must have had visitors today. Visitors with loud children and guns they kept shooting. The world is moving in on me. I better win the lottery soon so I can find a quieter place to live or I'm gonna go broke from wearing ear plugs.

I may be in a situation where I'm a'fixin' to go completely deaf. There are a lot of old sayings about how things look brightest just before the fall. It seems almost a shame to actually say it, but the way the ambient noise around my house has been driving me batty, I might actually like it. At least for a little while.

It's not the noise around me that's driving me nuts, but rather, my reaction to the noise around me that's driving me gaga. Lots of sounds that never made no difference to me just a short time back now drive me to distraction. I'm supposed to be in charge of what I let drive me to distraction. At least that's the plan. The world can do whatever it likes, but how I react to what the world does is up to me.

When I first started building my house I didn't have any sort of a plan, much less a set of blueprints. I imitated. I mimicked. I did what I am has always done. It gathered a bunch of building materials, bought some nails, and started putting things together catch as catch can.

As a result, it's not very well designed (I'd mimicked workmen, not architects), and since nothing measurable is standard by any means, every rework I perform is tailor-made to fit existing situations of some part of the house. My clumsy adaptions to it's haphazardness only makes it more… errr… hap-hazardous.

I waxed a little romantic at first by deciding I wanted a quarter of the second story of the loosely proposed house-to-be to be a balcony. A balcony that adjoined my bathroom (foolishly located on the second floor) so that I could walk outside from taking a shower and let the breeze on the balcony dry me off au natural. I wasted my youth when I was young.

Furthermore, without the slightest reflection about whether making it so was a well-thought out strategy, I decided to put an aluminum-framed sliding glass doors leading from my bathroom onto my romantic balcony. Big, heavy sliding doors, even when they're constructed from aluminum can be a real hassle to open and close over time. I began to dread using the unromantic energy it took to open and close that sliding door.

This entire arrangement was a bad idea, and when I remodeled the house specifically because of this romantic, but stupid balcony I put a roof over it and and enclosed the whole area which gave me a highly needed extra room, but now put the sliding glass doors inside my house.

A couple of days ago I took the double-paned sliding glass door outside of my house to the second-floor deck just outside my computer station. This is where the noise I complain about drives me craziest. I leaned the glass doors on their sides up against the deck railing, and then tied them down with some telephone wire to keep the wind from blowing them over.

This afternoon the notion popped in my head to take those double-paned doors and set them upright side-by-side against the rail to find out if they would block off some of the noise. I figured if the air space between the double panes insulate again changes in temperature it might do the same thing to insulate sound.

I may be deluding myself because I want this to work, but I sorta think it does work. Perhaps noticeably. As if maybe it takes the edge of the children screeching in play. the results I'm getting or pretending to get is encouraging.

The world is not going to change the way it is to suit my needs in this case. It's my problem. I'm the one who built my house unintentionally as an echo chamber that picks up noises from miles away. As if living next to the local airport were not enough.

If I came into some sort of windfall that provided me with the option of remaining here and going to considerable expense to sound-proof my house to more tolerable levels or moving to another location. I'm pretty sure I would move.

Hopefully the windfall would be large enough to allow me to be picky about choosing a new location. I don't think it's the nearness of the airport that bothers me here. With my imaginary deep pockets I could construct the necessary baffles to shunt the ambient sounds away from my comfort zone.

The main reason I would move is the unalterable fact that the airport authority has carte blanc through an act of eminent domain to take whatever I contracted for any reason they please. I hate being at their mercy. It's fighting city hall all over again. The individuals on the airport authority board may change, but not the type of people who like airplanes.

I've contemplated the dynamics of this situation many times before. Ideally, the only real solution is the modern day version of a teepee called a motor home. Just unhook the faucets and the toilet utilities, crank up the finely-tuned diesel engine, and drag ass.

Once, back when I made as much take home money in a week as I do a month now, I even went so far as to purchase a used motor home to fix up just to see if I might like it. It didn't happen. I got ripped off in that deal by some people who were supposed to be my friends. I didn't even realize it until after they both died.

It's unusual for me to know somebody fairly well who goes and dies on me. I've always figured that's because I moved around so much I didn't get a chance to make many people's acquaintance for very long. Both of those men were from up North and were truly what's called around hyah "Damn Yankees", because they came to visit and stayed.

Not so unusual was the fact that they both seemed troubled by what must have happened before they came here. By that I mean that they brought their troubles they had at home down here even though they sort of claimed moving here made them scot-free. It didn't.

I am is not a good janitor of it's own stuff. It doesn't have enough ambition. If something is good enough to get by until tomorrow, why bother with making it better than it has to be today. Shit happens. Things change. Death is always unexpected.

I am seems totally unreasonable in this regard. Things, objects de art, seem trivial to it that don't to me, and thats not a recent development.

To I-am-is it seems like all it asks is just to have a body that works pretty good for as long as it does, and a chance to play the game of life for as long as the body keeps going. There will always be more bodies to wear out. Bodies are like money. They'll make more.

I was impressed by the sight of the hiding place the Army found Saddam Hussein on television. It reminded me of how I live here and have always lived except during the sixteen years I was married. I was lousy at being married. Why am I always the last to know?

The only practical difference between his hootch and mine is that I don't have a rabbit hole to hide in if the invaders come looking for me. He had all those palaces as Iraq's dictator, but all he needed for himself was a place to stay out of the weather and a few pots and pans to cook with. I find myself wondering if he had a refrigerator. Oh well, he don't need one now.

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Pollyanna And Her Sisters

The property I currently own is my place in the world to be allone. Metaphorically, it's the temple in which I-am-is represents the capitalists the Christos tossed out in order to take over the whole religious operation itself. The I am is wot it yam, but only when it eats it's spinach. A spiritual lurker waiting in the shadows?

Will the real Gretchen please stand up? The real Gretchen died of natural causes, I suppose (if you consider a wooden stake through her heart a natural way to die, but it's natural if that's the only way she can die). Her death left a daughter named Gretchen who didn't deserve to be the real Gretchen's naymesake, and Pollyanna, the middle daughter, who did. It's about "Look who won in the end!"

This never bode well for me, and I didn't even know it was that strong a hate game until the very end. Even then it was years before my daughter told me that the real Gretchen who died reminded her every time she passed her deathbed how much the real Gretchen hated me. If she only knew.

The real Gretchen hated me the first time over the phone. She already hated me before we spoke on the phone, but afterward she knew it, and she hated me before we met face-to-face, and that eventual encounter only made her hate me worse. She meant to get her daughter back from me, and each daughter her daughter had made her want her daughter back even more.

I married the middle daughter who wanted the real Gretchen to love her more than her sister named Gretchen. She tried to out-Gretchen her sister by be-co-me-ing her mother instead of her self. She won, but by becoming the real Gretchen by proxy she gainsaid her sister and adopted her mother's hatred for me.

In a lotta ways I'm glad I'm not involved in this Medusian struggle any more, but it seems like my own children have inadvertently pulled me back into it despite the apparent fact that they'd rather not. I'd rather they not too.

I foresee a knockdown dragon fight between two sisters. One is slick and supremely detached and the other plain vicious and an emotional cyclone. I'm glad I live several states away from both of them. I wouldn't wanna be the duty-bound older brother either.

It would be nice if it didn't happen around my children, but I got no say so and haven't had for three decades. For understandable reasons or no that woman took our children and jumped and run. I hate it for all of us.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

 
Just call me nuts. This is the first time I've attempted to post a photo of any sort using the Blog This! feature of Blogger.com. If it works I'll probably post more.
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I like the colors in this shot. I swapped my heritage of some antique glass with my older sister to get that peach colored chair with the embossing. It's old and the upholstery is worn out. Sorta like me. '-)

Thursday, February 05, 2009

Flu City

I heard on the local news that a new strain of flu has been going around in the area. That must be what happened. I'm feeling much better today. What worried me was that the medicine I've been prescribed to my rheumatoid arthritis definitively lowers one's immune system. I'm pretty sure I had a close brush with death, and I may not be out of the woods yet.

The doctor at the Durham VA gave me a phone number and direct instructions to call him if I had an problems. Monday, I called and left a message to get him to call me back. I was pretty sure he would if he found out that I had called. He has called me before just after my appointment with him to see if I was taking the medicine, so I knew he wasn't averse to talking with me. I also figured it'd be a cold day in hell if he actually got my the message. That's why using the VA can be a death trap. The employees got a solid government check coming in and do what they want no matter what the doctors say.

The doctors don't make much money. They're all immigrants who take the government jobs to get cranked with their own practice in the US, so they're not gonna be there long, so the employees go along only as much as they need to until they're gone. The patients get caught in the middle of this dilemma and end up dead... and good riddance... their troubles don't stop the government checks from rolling in. Total apathy. Nobody knows or cares. No blame. The nurses appear to have the universal attitude most medicos do, "It's yo' money or yo' life."

I actually heard one of the nurses over at the Fayetteville VA state that if the veterans can't afford "a real doctor", then they deserve what they get (or don't get). This might be better than some other cultures, but I think mostly because the US is a melting pot, and prejudice is prejudice no matter where you are in the world.

I'm feeling a little sorry for myself that my house ain't properly heated. I wear the same clothes I wear to stay warm outside as I do in my house. I woke up to less than twenty degrees (-6.66 C) in my living room where my computer is, and it's only warmed up to 5-10 degrees now as it nears noon. I visited my brother next door to check with him about glucose testers he's been using lately, and he got outta bed after working most of the night, and answered the door with only his breeches on. He can walk around in his house nakid and still keep warm. I guess I was a little envious, and disappointed I've chosen to live like I live. But, only in the winter when it gets really cold like now. Being deathly ill doesn't help my attitude.

I sense that I'm getting a better grip on what Sartre writes about the homo sapien being possessed by two consciousness'. It comes down to people not recognizing the person the other thinks we are. We appear to be blind to it by convincing ourselves that everybody sees us as we think we are, that we are translucent to the other as we see ourselves. It's not true, of course, because we all project our own idea of self onto the other, and so we see the other as what we would be if we acted like them. They see us in the sa-me way.

Understanding this concept down to the bone seems necessary for me. It may be something I already know and write about, but since some doubt seems to hang around, I keep reflecting on it to see what comes up.